If you'd been away fighting a war, a senseless, brutal and dirty war, and you came back and no one gave a damn, how would you cope? Johann Feindt and Tamara Tempe follow the contrasting stories of those who became involved in the Russian –Chechnian conflict and their struggle to re-adjust to a disinterested society where the awful truth of the war is suppressed. Petja and Kiril signed up at 18 and Katja, a nurse, worked in a field hospital in the war zone. Left alone to deal with their memories of bombardments, torture and death, they return to their homeland and no-one wants to talk about it aside from the Russian Committee of Soldier’s Mothers who listen to them and their parents.

This war has no obvious winners. Everyone involved seems to lose. And for those who have been away, society's impressions of the war has changed, music's changed, the streets have changed and now the war is dressed up with a new ideology and called a 'war against terrorism'. Their dreams of peace and idyll back home, like camping under apple trees, that sustained them at the front cannot be realised. As Valerij puts it "We will be like white ravens" - rare birds and odd ones out. A sensitive and thought-provoking investigation of the nightmares of the war in Chechnya.

Awards: Library Prize, Cinéma du Réel, Paris 2005

In February of 1990 the author Jürgen Fuchs was giving a reading of the diaries he wrote about his detention in a Stasi jail. During the reading, a man stood up and said:" I'm one of those people you're talking about, but nobody listens to us." A month later, the film directors Tamara Trampe and Johann Feindt started their on-camera interviews with that man, Dr. Jochen Girke, a psychologist born in 1949 and former Lieutenant Colonel in the Stasi. During his time in the Stasi, he trained would-be interrogators, jail psychologists and informers' supervisory officers in operative psychology. The application of his scientific knowledge had devastating effects.

With unflinching forthrightness, the film tries to penetrate into the sealed mind of this man who says of himself:" I was a criminal by word." An artificial space becomes a sort of closed-cell for both the interviewed and the interviewer. But the filmmakers also leave this cell in order to visit the people who shared his life at that time and who, through either their expressed approval or their silence, gave him the feeling that what he was doing was acceptable.

"Our motto was: psychology in use for the person, with the person and against the person."(Dr. Jochen Girke)

Award: Prädikat: besonders wertvoll

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